Wrong Eyed Jesus and Grit Lit

A term i learned today: “grit-lit.”

I learned the term cause i watched the director’s commentary to a BBC documentary called “Searching for Wrong Eyed Jesus” (the film and commentary are quite interesting)

And they was-a-talkin about the man that was really the heart of the film – a southern writer named Harry Crews.

And when i looked up Harry Crews on wiki, it had this:

“Influence and Grit Lit

Harry Crews’s work has become synonymous with the genre Grit Lit. Crews is considered a major influence, alongside Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah, along with later writers in the genre including Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Donald Ray Pollock. Grit Lit is usually set in rural areas and often in what has been called the “Rough South”. Larry Brown, one of the most celebrated writers in the genre, objected to the term “Grit Lit”, but he dedicated his novel, Fay, to Crews, calling him “my uncle in all ways but blood.”[8] He and Crews remained friends until Brown’s death in 2004.

Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader, defines the genre as “as typically blue collar or working class, mostly small town, sometimes rural, occasionally but not always violent, usually but not necessarily southern.”[9] The subjects of the stories often have to deal with extreme circumstances for survival. The characters are usually use their roughness, depravity, and violence as a means of living. Crews’s work has become synonymous with the “Rough South,” though he did not like the label “Southern writer”. Grit Lit itself can become an “acquired taste”[10], for those not from the South….”

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This is a scene from the film with Harry Crews a-walkin.